Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 11:01:12 -0800 From: Joe Kelsey <joek@mail.flyingcroc.net> To: FreeBSD GNOME <freebsd-gnome@freebsd.org>, freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, freebsd-ports <freebsd-ports@freebsd.org> Subject: WARNING: portupgrade considered harmful Message-ID: <3E5FB1F8.4050405@mail.flyingcroc.net>
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Some time ago, the maintainers of the pkgtools slipped a new ability into portupgrade: the ability to silently move "obsolete" shared libraries into /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg. This so-called "feature" has caused me no end of trouble in the last few days. The problem is that the "feature" interacts very badly with the fundamental purpose of portupgrade, which is to detect out-of-date packages and aid in automatically upgrading them. Unfortunately, the presence of all of the obsolete libraries accumulating in the compat/pkg directory only serves to prevent protupgrade from fulfilling its mission because ld will silently use old, obsolete libraries instead of the new libraries! I have carefully followed recommendations for upgrading various components on my system, only to discover that the upgrade process has been foiled by this "feature". For instalce, Xft used to be available in two versions, Xft and Xft2. Joe Marcus Clarke was careful to warn everyone when Xft2 replaced Xft to do "portupgrade -fr Xft" to force reinstallation of Xft, replacing the now obsolete Xft2 with a newversion of the Xft library and forcing all applications to relink. Well, due to the fact that portupgrade silently placed Xft2 in the compat/pkg directory, this did not happen! I was left with references to the obsoloet Xft2 *along side* the correct reference to Xft in binaries! The only way to rid myself of this was to delete the compat/pkg directory and them start all over with the entire portupgrade sequence. Now, I am left with having to do the whole thing all over due to bad references to libintl.so.2 instead of libintl.so.4. The portupgrade maintainers have perpetrated a disaster in the making on a lot of unsuspecting people. I recommend that everyone edit their /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf files and add -u to the default portupgrade switches to prevent this from happening. You may also need to audit all of your binaries for stale library references. This could be a cause of the problems that many seem to have with the Xft-enabled Mozilla. /Joe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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